Acute NMDA toxicity in cultured rat cerebellar granule neurons is accompanied by autophagy induction and late onset autophagic cell death phenotype

Abstract

Collectively, this study shows that autophagy machinery is robustly induced in cultured neurons subjected to prolonged exposure to excitotoxin, while autophagosome clearance by lysosomal pathway might be impaired. Our data further show that prolonged autophagy contributes to cell death in NMDA-mediated excitotoxicity.